The Sad Truth About Chasing Status - David Pinsof

David Pinsof is a research scientist at UCLA, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity and an author. Humans want things. Then we tell ourselves stories about why we want those things. And these reasons are often very flattering, but almost exclusively bullshit. We do not understand our motivations, and this is part of our brain's design. So, given this limit on introspection, is it possible to ever truly understand ourselves? Expect to learn the difference between bullshitting and lying, why we can’t we admit that we want status, why human desires are so fickle and silly, how the modern world has hijacked our status games, why we find certain things interesting, why you actually don't want to be happy no matter how much you claim that you do and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on Bubs Naturals at https://www.bubsnaturals.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #status #power #happiness - 00:00 Why is Everything Bullshit? 06:40 How to Properly Absorb Evolutionary Psychology 11:07 The Randomness of Status Games 15:21 How Social Media Has Impacted Status Games 18:00 How to Gain Status While Hiding Status Signalling 25:44 What If I’m Just Being Altruistic? 30:11 What People Misunderstand About Our Desires 35:14 Our Need to Out-Compete Our Elders 43:08 Do People Really Want to Be Happy? 52:06 Finding a Life Purpose Beyond Status-Seeking 1:01:59 Why We Find Certain Things Interesting 1:12:09 Where to Find David - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Why is everything bullshit? Oh, well, for two reasons. One is that we don't really know the true reasons for why we do things. So we think that we can just introspect on our minds and just and the true reasons for why we do things just comes to the surface. We have full access to all of our underlying motivations and goals. But there is a lot of research, decades of it, in fact, that shows that that is not true. What we're really doing when we're explaining why we do things is we're coming up with a nice sounding, self flattering story. A story that makes us look good, that makes us look competent and rational and virtuous.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  But we really don't know the truth about why we do things. And the other reason is that we are just as in the dark, if not more in the dark, about why other people do things. That is, we don't have access to their inner monologue or to the sights and sounds that make up their consciousness. And yet, we are often just as confident about the reasons we give for other people's behavior as we are about the reasons we give for our own behavior. So if you combine these two facts, that we don't know why we ourselves do things and we don't know why other people do things, and you combine those two facts with the fact that most of what we talk about ultimately pertains to the reasons why we and other people do things.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Well, then, most of what we talk about is bullshit. How is that different to lying? Well, lying is when you deliberately misrepresent the truth. So you know what the truth is and you are intentionally saying something different. Bullshitting is when you don't really know the truth or when you don't really care about the truth. The truth is just not your concern. It's irrelevant. You're trying to pursue a social goal, whether that's looking good, whether that's persuading someone, whether that's, you know, making yourself look virtuous or competent or rational or getting

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Better deal in a negotiation. That's the goal, not truth. And you might occasionally say true things in service of that goal, but whenever you do, it's by accident. It's not by design. The truth just happens to conveniently serve your purposes in that particular instance. But when it doesn't serve your purposes, you neglect it, ignore it, downplay it, minimize it, et cetera. So really what bullshitting is, is a kind of truth free communication. You don't care about what's what's true and it's just not at the top of your mind. It's not your your top priority.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes I guess it may end up being that the thing that you are bullshitting about may also end up being true. You might kind of like close your eyes, throw the dart and it hits the bullseye on the truth dartboard. And like, hooray, like I told the truth today.

• 3:01Chris Williamson?

  This can be quite disempowering, I imagine, for many people to hear that you you don't truly know yourself. You don't truly know other people. The things that you do believe that you're doing and not the you're not doing them for the reasons that you think that you're doing them.

• 3:15Chris Williamson?

  How do you not become a despondent black pill that throws himself off a bridge? Given the fact that you've basically told everyone listening from your insight of expertise as a trained academic in the world of psychology, that truly understanding yourself and the people around you is a hopeless, thankless, impossible task.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Hmm. Well, I don't think it's impossible. I thought if it was impossible, I wouldn't be researching it. I wouldn't be writing about it. I wouldn't have a sub stack called everything is bullshit. So it must be possible for at least somebody to be right about why we do things. And, you know, it just so happens that I think I'm the one who's right. I think we have I have the real reasons why we do things. And I think those reasons are backed up by a lot of interesting research from psychology and from evolutionary biology and game theory. So I wouldn't say that the search for the true reasons for our behavior is hopeless. But that doesn't make it any less flattering. I mean, it doesn't.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  I mean, the thing is, it's still kind of a bummer because even if we can say what the true reasons for our behavior are, those aren't going to be the reasons that we like. They're not going to be the ones that make us look good because obviously we have an incentive to give better reasons for our behavior than the true ones. So finding out the true ones is going to be a bummer necessarily. It's going to make us look bad. It's going to make us feel uncomfortable and it's going to disrupt a lot of the status games that we play with one another. So, you know, it's a bummer, but it's a double edged sword. I mean, you can use it to attack your rivals and attack, you know, status games that you see other people playing that you don't like. It's going to be much harder for you to call out the bullshit in yourself and to call out the bullshit and the status games

• 4:58Speaker 00

  you're playing. But, you know, ultimately, I think that a clearer understanding of ourselves is going to lead to good outcomes. I'm not sure what the exact causal pathway is between knowledge and good outcomes, but I'm pretty confident the pathway is there.

• 5:14Chris Williamson?

  In Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True, which I know that you're a fan of as well, he's got this great quote that says, ultimately happiness comes down to deciding between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. I know that happiness is something that we may end up getting into later on as well, but I do think that largely he's true. And I asked Jeffrey Miller this, I've asked David Buss this. I've talked a lot about evolutionary psychology on the podcast over the last two to three years. It's been a pet obsession of mine. I find it endlessly fascinating and it seems as close to me as a discipline that appears under the hood

• 5:57Chris Williamson?

  of human motivation to work out the genuine reasons for why we do things. And it doesn't always get that right, but it tries to get close to it. But as many of the people listening to the show and I have realized, it can become disheartening to realize that you are essentially a marionette being played by the puppeteer of this ancient millennia old programming. You know, anybody that's taken the proximate versus ultimate reasons for behavior red pill understands that even the best reasons that you can give for the things that you do are not the reasons why you do them. So the rabbit hole descends very deeply.

• 6:40Chris Williamson?

  For the people that I have force fed a lot of EP to over the last, whatever, thousand days or so, how would you advise them to ameliorate or absorb the insights that they learned that are fascinating from the world of evolutionary psychology or even behavioral genetics and stuff like that, too? How do you deal with this? The fact that it's both interesting and enlightening and can make you feel less agentic and less sort of sovereign over your own behaviors as well? How do you avoid that making you feel too despondent?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  It's interesting. The way I avoid it is by going one step even deeper and analyzing the despondency itself and where that comes from and seeing that the despondency itself is another kind of marionette string that is, you know, being pulled by my deeper biological instincts. So if you think about what that despondency is, well, it's the feeling that your collective projects that you're engaging in, your goals, that they're being exposed in some sense. And all of a sudden, their value has decreased. Because, I mean, this is something that I've written about recently.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  We cannot play a status game if we're all aware that it's a status game. Because as soon as we become aware of it, then we stop getting status for playing it. Because wanting status is a cue of low status. We don't like status seekers. We don't like social climbers. We call them vain and narcissistic and insecure and selfish and petty. And we don't want to be seen in that way. So this creates a paradox in that in order to seek status, we cannot be seen as seeking status. We have to somehow get status without making it look like that was the goal. Right? And when I say it's the goal, that can be destabilizing. It can threaten to make our status games that we're all playing together collapse. And we hate that. That's scary.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Because if they collapse, then we could lose all our accumulated status that we've gained over many years of playing this game and practicing it and honing our strategies. Right? That's very scary and very threatening. And, you know, there's not much I can say to make it any less scary. It is scary, but... I think the upside of it is that being aware of the status games we play and the logic of how they work can help us choose between them a little more wisely. Some status games are clearly better for the world than others. Some status games lead to better outcomes. I think status is ultimately, or sorry, I think science is ultimately a status game.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  You know, scientists are, you know, competing for prestige, just like any other human in any other industry. Right? They, they want to get that citation count up. They want to impress their peers and show off their, their formidable intellects.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  And I think if we understand that that's ultimately how science works, that empowers us to shape the institution of science. So that scientists are incentivized to uncover more true things. And if we're aware of how other institutions work, we can shape the incentives to create better results. And if we're, you know, young, we're having a midlife crisis and haven't yet decided what status game we're going to play. Understanding how they work is going to help us choose the status game that is ultimately going to lead to better results for all of us. And so if we can make us all more enlightened, more aware of the games we're playing, we can be wiser stewards of those games and we can choose more wisely among those games.

• 10:22Chris Williamson?

  I think the bottom line is there is no environment, there is no situation in which more ignorance I can, would create a better outcome. There are, there are troughs of despair, whatever that thing of like enlightenment is, there's a path of enlightenment. And there's the trough of despair and the valley of difficulty and the, the peak of believing you know it before you descend back into the valley of despair again. But there, there is no situation in which I can imagine more ignorance would actually be, uh, would be useful for this. So I want to get into seeing whether we can squeeze the spiral of status and seeking it and then undoing it and then learning it again. To see if we can actually get to the point of doing something which is good for us and why we do what we do.

• 11:06Chris Williamson?

  But before we even do that, like, why is status so weird and random, just high level? Why is it like that?

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Well, it goes back to what I was talking about, about the fact that we cannot play a status game while being aware that it's a status game. So there's an inherent fragility at the heart of all of our status games. There's a paradox there. And the paradox is, we cannot know what we're doing while we're doing it. Right? So in order for us to successfully compete for status with one another, the secret cannot get out that we're competing for status. Right? So if we're engaged in a self-important, serious intellectual conversation, it cannot be revealed that what we're doing is participating in an intellectual pissing contest. You know, if you and I found out that we're just, you know, we're pissing around and trying

• 11:58Speaker 00

  to show off our impressive intellects, well, then all of a sudden, we would lose all of our motivation to play the game. We would not be having the conversation because the opportunity, the potential to gain status from it would be gone.

• 12:10Chris Williamson?

  Why is it, why is it the case that thinking about the game destroys the game?

• 12:14Speaker 00

  Well, because as soon as we think about the game, we realize that it is a game and that we realize that we're status seekers, and then we can no longer gain status because we don't like status seekers.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  Why don't we like, why don't we like status seekers?

• 12:27Speaker 00

  For a number of reasons. One is that we see them as selfish. They tend to prioritize their own status seeking over the well-being of others. That's one reason. Another reason is that they're probably low status. If you want status, that means that you don't have it. Right? So that's another reason. We don't like them because we see them as disingenuine, as manipulative, as dishonest, as willing to lie or backstab to raise their own status. So for all these reasons, being seen as a status seeker is going to lower your status. That's, that's the paradox.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  And so because we cannot let that cat out of the bag, that makes our status games inherently fragile and prone to collapsing. Under the weight of their own recognition, right?

• 13:24Chris Williamson?

  Yes, so you you've got this quote in one of your articles where you say, we pretend we don't care about status as a way of gaining status. So the the point being that not only is the game undone as soon as you stare in the mirror or say Beetlejuice three times and then status status all descends on you. Um, you can also be more flippant or more casual about the byproduct of status you gain from doing the thing that is status seeking whilst not recognizing it. By playing it that way, you gain even more status by avoiding looking like this Machiavellian manipulator that's wheedling his way to the top.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah, so if I, you know, buy a Prius because I care about the environment, that's a very different story that you could tell about me than me buying a Prius to show off my virtue. Right? And it's the same behavior in both cases, but the intention is different. The goal is different. Um, and insofar as the status seeking goal is revealed, it cannot be achieved. So if I am just, you know, uh, buying Priuses and, uh, you know,

• 14:32Speaker 00

  avoiding plastic and and doing all these environmental things just to look good and just to show off how great I am. Well, I'm not going to get status for doing that. My heart has to be in the right place in order to get status, in order to actually look virtuous. In order to signal my virtue, I cannot know that I'm signaling my virtue and you cannot know that I'm signaling my virtue. Because if you knew, you wouldn't, you wouldn't award me virtue.

• 14:53Chris Williamson?

  So I understand the why I can't know, why other people shouldn't be able to detect. But why is it important that you yourself aren't aware of this? Is it just because the best way to deceive others is to believe it yourself?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  That's the idea. Yeah, as George Costanza once said, uh, in Seinfeld, uh, it's not a lie if you believe it. Yeah, I think we have to convince ourselves of these things in order to be more convincing to others.

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that makes that makes a whole other sense. How is it the case then that in 2023, virtue signaling and performative empathy are two of the biggest trends on the internet? That to me, on its face, just seems like totally transparent.

• 15:36Chris Williamson?

  What's happening there? Have you have you considered virtue signaling or performative empathy and and kind of some of the um facilitations that modern technology has enabled people's status seeking and how it's molested and perverted that?

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, uh, social media is a really weird and alien form of socializing that we have invented. Uh, and it's, it's alien in the sense that it's, uh, it's, it's like shouting your opinions on a loudspeaker to, you know, uh, to hundreds or thousands of people. Uh, you know, socializing in the ancestral environment and small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, um, you weren't really talking to more than a few people at any given time. Uh, so the fact that you can tweet something and have hundreds or thousands or even millions of people read it, uh, is a really novel situation, and it makes the reputational consequences of our activity on social media way, uh, more important than they were in ancestral environments.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  So in some sense, our psychology is not equipped to deal with this. Uh, and the other, uh, weird thing about social media is that there's a permanence to it. So if I tweet something, it's gonna be really hard for me to get rid of all evidence of that tweet on the internet, right? Uh, uh, the same thing goes for posting something on social media or saying something on a podcast. Like, the information is gonna be present on some computer somewhere, right? And that is also a really weird thing, you know? If you're socializing with a bunch of hunter-gatherers, uh, and you say something offhandedly, the fact that, you know, most people are probably gonna forget that or, or, or not know exactly what it was that you said, that is to your advantage, right?

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Because if they might misremember it, you might be able to dispute what their interpretation was of what you said. You know, there's a little bit of ambiguity and room for negotiation uh, in a, in a, in a free-flowing conversation where memory is the only means of recording it. Uh, but where we have computers recording it, uh, all of a sudden, that, that, that makes our words like set in stone uh, and undeniable, and I, I can no longer like wiggle out of something I said on the internet 10 years ago. Like, it's written in stone, I can't change it, uh, and, and I can't negotiate. I can't say, "Oh, you're just remembering it wrong," you know, like, that strategy is not available to me. Uh, so it's those two things, I think, the permanence and, and the huge audience we have that are really alien to us,

• 17:55Speaker 00

  and I think they're messing with our psyches in really profound ways.

• 18:00Chris Williamson?

  Going back to the fundamentals of how status works, it seems to me that the sweet spot is to somehow find a way to signal a trait whilst concealing the fact that you're signaling the trait. But the problem here is that the signaling of the trait is ultimately the thing that's going to get you status. So you can't completely conceal it, because if you completely concealed it, then it wouldn't achieve you any status in the first place.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Hmm, that's right.

• 18:25Chris Williamson?

  How do we balance this?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the key is the word completely there. So if we completely concealed it, then we wouldn't do anything or say anything, right? We wouldn't leave the house. We wouldn't be going on podcasts or writing Substack posts. The trick is to conceal it maybe 90% of the way, you know, so that, you know, only the really attentive person is going to pick up on the fact that you're great, you know. And the thing is, they cannot pick up on the fact that you were trying to look great. They have to pick up on the fact that you are great. So you have to make your signal look like a cue. So it's probably important

• 19:07Speaker 00

  to backpedal on the distinction between signals and cues. So signal is something that is intended to convey information, right? So if I say, hey, look at me, that's a signal. In evolutionary biology, we talk about signals as being something that evolved for the purpose of conveying information. A cue is something that is not intended to convey information. In evolutionary biology, we say it evolved, but the reason it evolved was not to convey information. So for example, if I'm sweating a lot, or if I'm stammering a lot during this interview, that's a cue that I'm nervous, but it's not a signal. Cues are important in that observers can use them as valuable sources of information

• 19:48Speaker 00

  to guide their behavior. But they weren't intentionally emitted by the person, right? So the thing is, we're constantly looking for valid cues about a person's character, right? But we're not looking for signals, because we know that signals are, can be dishonest in some sense. We know that there's an incentive to fudge and distort signals to make ourselves look good, right? And so we really, we want to...

• 20:22Speaker 00

  We want to catch someone in their in their true form as if they weren't being watched. You know, we want to gain deep insight into into, you know, what they're what they're really like and how they're really going to behave when no one's looking. Right. And so that's the game that we play is we try to make our signals look like cues. We try to make it look like we're we're going to behave this way when no one's looking. When people are looking or when we think people are looking. Or or maybe we're not even aware of it at all. But but in any case, that's the game we're playing because we're ultimately looking for reliable signs of a person's character so that we can count on them to behave in certain ways when we're not judging them, when we're not looking them, when they might have the opportunity to backstab us. We really that's that's the key thing that we're looking for.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  And we want to try to signal that without making it look like we're signaling that. And in some sense, we may not even know ourselves that we're signaling that. It may be better for it to be unconscious.

• 21:17Chris Williamson?

  It's got me thinking about the common held piece of dating advice, which is look at how they treat serving staff and waiters when you go to restaurants. And I think that that I might be right in saying that that is something people think of as a cue that is indicative of a signal, that it's indicative of something that's deeper. It's, you know, it's like the sweating or the stammering that it's seen as such a normal, everyday interaction that it should be people at their least encumbered. Right. This is their true your true self comes out on YouTube between 10pm and 11pm at night. And when you're dealing with a serving a serving staff person or a waiter in a restaurant that's got your order wrong, like those are the two times that you're at your truest.

• 22:03Chris Williamson?

  You're most transparent. And I I'm thinking about different examples of that. What about you? You wrote this great article on your Substack that everyone should go and check out about status. Was there anything that popped up that you thought was a particularly interesting example of the weird ways that status can get hijacked, that people use it and abuse it and and kind of get confused by it?

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, so, uh, actually, there was an interesting piece in the New York Times, uh, I was reading, um, about how wealth signals have become concealed. Um, so I don't know if you noticed this, but in succession, uh, one of the main characters was wearing a baseball cap. But if you actually zoom in on the cap and do some research, you find out that the cap is like $20,000 or something like that, right? So it might look like a normal baseball cap that sort of conveys his, you know, working class nonchalance. And yet it is just a covert, uh, status signal. Uh, and then the article goes through many examples of these things that are designed to look cheap and mundane and commonplace, but on closer examination are actually wildly expensive.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Uh, and that sort of, what we call that in game theory is a buried signal. That is, only some people can, can, uh, detect the signal. So wealthy people are going to know that it's, that it's expensive, but ordinary people aren't going to know. So you're trying to signal the trade to a specific type of audience, uh, whom you really value, uh, while maybe not caring so much about other audiences. Uh, so that's, that's an interesting, uh, example of it. Um, and the other interesting example of how these status games work is, um, what I call sacred values. And I think, uh, what a sacred value does is it allows us to play a status game, uh, without realizing it's a status game. And that basically what they are is they're, they're cover stories.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  They're narratives that we all share and that we all tell ourselves about the true reasons why we're doing things. Uh, and they're often altruistic and noble, uh, and idealistic, uh, and overly abstract, um, so that they can potentially accommodate, uh, any, anything we're doing. Um, you know, stuff like authenticity, self-actualization, happiness, equality, justice, honor. Um, these are all sacred values that are, uh, designed to protect our status games from collapsing. Uh, and, and the way they, uh, protect our status games is by, uh, appearing as though they are the opposite of status.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  So insofar as, as status is petty and small-minded and selfish, uh, sacred values are high-minded and altruistic and larger than ourselves. Um, we want to try to engineer the concept to be as distant from status as possible so that it's not confused with status. Cause as soon as it's confused with status, the status game collapses.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  So that's what a big part of what I think sacred values are. And, and I think if you look at any cult, any tight knit group, their status hierarchies are bathed in sacredness. Sacredness is saturated in their culture. It's not even a status hierarchy. It's, it's a justified great chain of being, you know, it's, you know, these people are genuinely wiser and more virtuous, and that's why they have power over us, you know? We're not submitting to a dominant alpha, the alpha, you know, the person is, is shepherding us toward wisdom and transcendence. And so I think having a nice sacred ideology or belief system allows a status game to

• 25:31Speaker 00

  really persist and remain stable for a long time and, and protect the members of that community from, from the kind of collapses that I'm talking about.

• 25:43Chris Williamson?

  What do you say to the people who reply, eat shit, David? Honor and integrity and telling the truth and altruism and empathy and hard work and all of this stuff, that those are axiomatically good things and you trying to pull the wool from my eyes and say that this is actually secretly me trying to get laid, you need, you need to get in the sea?

• 26:09Speaker 00

  I would say that, you know, I actually have some sympathy for, for that reaction. So I'm not saying that because these sacred values are bullshit, that they're necessarily bad. I think, you know, some bullshit is better for the world than, than other bullshit, you know? You look at science, you know, it's, it's bathed in sacred values of knowledge and wisdom and disinterested truth seeking. And, and in some sense, there, those values are bullshit. But in another sense, it's really good that those are the values that are, you know, being pursued, or at least, you know, being pretended to, to be pursued. Because the institution of science needs those values in order to persist and in order to uncover genuine truths.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  For the same reason, you know, status games around success in business or athletics or whatever, they can motivate genuinely good behavior. And yes, you could say that at the end of the day, it's motivated by, by status, but...

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, at some point, you gotta shrug your shoulders and just say that's human nature and we gotta deal with that and we gotta accept it. Uh, and if we wanna change the world for a better, we, for the better, we have to recognize that. Cause if we wanna create a better world, there's no way to do that other than by changing the social norms, which ultimately means changing what gets us status and what doesn't. Like, that's, that's what social change is at the end of the day. It's changing what gets us status and what doesn't. And if you don't realize that that's how social change works, you're not gonna change anything. And so I think being realistic about how this works is going to make us wiser, uh, both consumers of culture and producers of culture.

• 27:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what should people take away, given that you've just spent 20 minutes deconstructing potentially what everybody is motivated to do their behaviors due to? How should this inform the way that they see the world and move forward?

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, I think it can give you, um, a little more compassion and empathy, honestly. Um, and that you realize that everyone out there is just as scared and insecure and self-conscious and lonely as you are. And that's ultimately what's driving their behavior. Um, and you know, it can help us, you know, have a little empathy for the people we might disagree with politically. You know, we, we, we like to think that they're in pursuit of some, you know, evil wicked agenda, but really they're just, they're in pursuit of the same agenda we are. You know, they, they wanna be loved, they wanna be praised and respected. Uh, and that's ultimately what's behind them and, and you know, we, we have the same human nature as them.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Uh, and the more we understand that, I think the more we can better work together with those people, uh, under the recognition of our own shared humanity.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, uh, a couple of things that definitely most people that did heinous, awful, despicable things in the past believed that they were doing good. There's very few people who actually do evil things in full recognition that it's evil. Because that's not the way that we're wired. What, what would be the motivation to do that? There has to be something on the other side of it. Um, and

• 29:16Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 29:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think the

• 29:20Chris Williamson?

  Acceptance of the fact that status games aren't going away. Ultimately, it's very difficult to even conceive of a world in which genuine altruism, bereft of any sort of reflective glory on the person, the altruist, what that would even look like, how that would even work and how you would motivate someone to do it. So the bottom line being that you need to work with the world the way that it is, as opposed to the way that you would have it be. It's not this first principles, pure rationality. This is, you know, long termism meets effective altruism thing, bro. Like, that's just not how we're wired. And the way that we are wired and the most effective way to do this is to say, okay,

• 30:01Chris Williamson?

  we have kind of like the thermodynamics of human behavior going on here.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 30:07Chris Williamson?

  We need to be able to play within the rules of this game. And there's another, another Substack post of yours, which I absolutely loved, which was to do with desires, our desires and how they work. So what is it, what is it that most people don't understand about how desires work, do you think?

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, the thing that people don't understand and perhaps aren't willing to admit, because it's uncomfortable to admit, is that our desires are relative. They're competitive. We don't just want to get an education. We want better educational credentials than our rivals. You know, we don't just want people to like us. They want, we want people to like us more than they like other people. We don't just want to have opinions, we want to have better opinions and smarter and wittier opinions than other people.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  You know, the list goes on. I list, I think, like 10 or 12 of them in the post. But the idea is that we're constantly comparing ourselves to other people. Because ultimately, we are evolved creatures. We are products of Darwinian natural selection. And biological fitness is an inherently relative concept. So I could have, you know, all the food I want, you know? I can, I can have a nice, a nice house, access to water, you know? I could get everything I want. But if my neighbors are doing way better than me. Then that's not going to matter. Eventually, my genes are going to dwindle relative to the genetic representation of my neighbors, right?

• 31:37Speaker 00

  So ultimately, from a Darwinian standpoint, I want to have higher fitness than my rivals, than my competitors. That is the only way to maximize my genetic representation in future generations. So it's comparative, it's competitive. Natural selection is the competition between the stuff that's selected and the stuff that's not selected. Which means that we, our brains, are collections of the stuff that was selected. Right? Which means that that stuff had to be better in some sense than the stuff that wasn't selected. Which means that our desires are ultimately revolving around being better than our competitors, being better than our rivals. I do think that it's, to a significant extent, built into our nervous systems. And there's a problem.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  I don't think that we can, we can change that fact. I think, I think it's, I think evolution wired us to outcompete our rivals. Because the most competitive among us, we're most likely to outcompete their rivals and we're most likely to pass on their genes to the next generation. Right? We are descended from the most competitive and successfully competitive of our ancestors. We weren't, we're not descended from the uncompetitive losers, right?

• 32:49Speaker 00

  But of course, the irony is we're descended from competitive people who successfully concealed their competitive nature. Because in order to win the competition, you cannot look competitive. Right? We compete to reassure each other that it's not a competition.

• 33:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay, and there's a problem.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the problem is that we can't all get what we want. Right? If what we want is inherently relative to what other people have, then we cannot get what we want at the same time. Right? And that, that is the problem. So that, what that means is that We're just going to keep competing with one another until the end of time. We're never going to achieve some utopia where there's no more social hierarchy or where everyone is happy for all time. Because no matter how much stuff we get, we're always going to be comparing ourselves and our stuff to our neighbors and the stuff that they have. Right? And we could all be, you know, have intergalactic time traveling pods. We could have, you know, immortality elixirs.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  And yet we're still going to be jealous and envious of our neighbors who have better immortality elixirs and better intergalactic time traveling pods than we have. Right? It's never going to go away. There's no, um, there's no happy ending to the human drama. We're just going to keep jockeying for status until we obliterate ourselves or go extinct. But there is some hope. I don't want to be completely depressing here. I know that I tend to lean in that direction with my Substack and I'm trying to work against it. But I think the one way we can sort of outsmart evolution is by success, successively out competing older generations. So if, if status and living standards keep rising from generation to generation, then

• 34:32Speaker 00

  we're all better than somebody. And that's always going to be the previous generation. And that's great because ultimately what we want is to be better than somebody. It gives everyone what they want. But here's the loophole is that the previous generations actually want future generations, which include their children and grandchildren, to be better off than themselves. It's in, it's in their Darwinian fitness interests for future generations to, to do well. Right? So everybody wins when we keep, when we outcompete our elders. You know, when we say, okay, boomer, that is, that is the slogan of human progress.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  We, we want old people to become more and more irrelevant.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's brilliant. So I, I've got it in my head. Gene Twangy's work on generations looked at how from whatever it was, the Gen X's and the one before it, the Not the boom, what was the one just after the Great Depression? Anyway, that group all the way through, and she talks about this uprising of the middle class, the ease of access to cars, the ease of access to households, et cetera, et cetera. And then you see this pivot, and you can even see, you call it intergenerational competition theory, you can even see the reverse of this at work, or when this goes wrong. And I think that millennials and specifically Gen Z have a bee in their bonnet, because they look at their parents' generation, and they see that they

• 35:57Chris Williamson?

  were able to buy a house by the age 30, and they were able to support a family just on one living wage, and they were able to afford two cars and two holidays per year on a normal job. And they don't think that that's the case. And yeah, there are children who are upset that they're not doing better than their parents, but there are very rarely parents who are upset to see their children doing better than them. And I think that that seesore asymmetry explains your ICT idea.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I think you can explain a lot of the problems we're having by the inability of some segments of the population to outcompete their elders. And if you look at, you know, the research on what's called deaths of despair, it's primarily happening among groups of people who think of themselves as failing to outcompete their elders, or among elders who view their children as failing to outcompete them. So

• 36:57Chris Williamson?

  Oh wow, that's one as well, that parents have dispossessed children?

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. So I think what happens is when we fail to outcompete our elders, and we're all on the same playing field, well, then the zero sum competitive tragedy of the human condition catches up to us. And now, all of a sudden, we all have to be better than each other again, right? We were all happy when we could all be better than old people, right? We all win, you know? But if we're not better than old people, then oh no, who are we going to be better than? Now we have to compete with one another. You know, we have to, we have to form coalitions and tribes to, to get more stuff than other people. And all of a sudden, the competitive ugliness of human nature kicks in. So I really do think that the, the key to prosperity is, is intergenerational, successful intergenerational competition. It might be the one thing that is preventing us from killing each other.

• 37:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I dropped my insight about this to do with the fact that because of this comparative game that I think is relatively inescapable. Definitely at a macro level, individually, you know, enough meditation psychedelics might be able to dissuade you of this, but that's, that's not going to work for the populace. I said to Sam Harris, I think it's a reason that universal basic income fundamentally doesn't work because you end up flattening the income hierarchy down. Oh, we've got robots to do everything now and we believe that everyone's just gonna lie under a tree, totally blissed out, doing fucking poetry and, and, and playing the acoustic guitar. What's, what, what's more likely going to happen is that people are going to find weird and wonderful ways to accumulate status again.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  They're going to start this competition game all over again. Okay. So we flattened income. You've, you will have read Will Stor's book, uh, The Status Game, where he talks about that, uh, group that has yams. They, they build, grow the biggest yam and then they give it to their enemy. Like it, it's just going to be a society of people growing massive yams or, or crocheting or whatever it is that's, you know, an arbitrary, not that much more or less arbitrary than accumulating resources or buying a Ferrari or a Rolex or getting boob job. But, you know, largely just a different status game. And I think that it's, it's one of the problems that you get when you look at, um, at UBI.

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  And also, uh, if you're right, and I feel like you probably are, and this intergenerational competition theory is one of the domesticating forces that keeps people feeling happy and sane. That I might not be doing better than my next door neighbor, but I'm doing better than my parents on average across, across a civilization. If we are about to face a population collapse in which you're going to have negative GDP growth for a sustained period of time. And we can't offset that with automation and AI. You are locking in. You're locking in pan-generational recession, right?

• 39:47Chris Williamson?

  And I think that, you know, for all that you can say objectively, living standards should be able to be ameliorated because we've got all of the automation and the blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, but how do people feel they're doing? Like, what's the mental state of the 2060 born child compared with our generation now? What, what, how do they, how do they feel about this? And if they look back and they see a golden era that we think is some awful version of the actual golden era that was the boomers and they look back and they think you, it's despondency all the way down.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I, I agree with you in some sense and that we cannot get rid of our status games. And I think a lot of toxicity comes from the misguided notion that we can, that we can achieve a status free utopia. I think that's a dangerous idea and a fundamentally unrealistic idea. I think, you know, you, you mentioned Will Storey's book, The Status Game. He's got a wonderful chapter on the rise of communism and how it was a competitive dominant movement that appeared to be against competitiveness and against dominance. You know, it was an egalitarian, anti-egalitarian movement that created enormous balances, enormous imbalances of power and inequalities of power and status. Among the more, you know, the loyal members of the regime got all these benefits and privileges

• 41:07Speaker 00

  and perks, you know, the disloyal members of the regime were excluded, marginalized, sometimes killed, sometimes sent to forced labor camps. So if you think about the communist utopia where everyone is equal, it is in fact the opposite, where it has some of the starkest and ugliest and most brutal forms of inequality known to our species. So I certainly agree with you that utopian theorizing is misguided. I agree with you that getting rid of our status games is impossible. And I also agree that it's, and in some sense, we need to choose among the status games that are the best for our species. And insofar as status games go, I think competing to offer people goods and services at more

• 41:50Speaker 00

  and more affordable prices is not that bad of a status game. You know, like it incentivizes us to do things that are generally helpful and to give things, give things to people that they generally want. So I think markets are a pretty good status game as far as status games go. And I think that they are. Sadly underrated by a lot of people on the political left. That isn't to say that they can't coexist with with a basic income. Perhaps they can as you know, as a sort of safety net for, you know, the direst forms of poverty, but I do think that we need to appreciate the benefits of markets as incentivizing the right kinds of behavior. And I think oftentimes, the reason why we don't like markets is because the status competition is too out in the open for us.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  It's too icky. You know, we don't like to be seen as greedy or as materialistic. And so in order to signal that we're not greedy and we're not materialistic, we often oppose capitalism and oppose markets. And we try to create anti consumerist consumer cultures where we consume anti consumerist books and t shirts and podcasts. But at the end of the day, I think it's misguided and we need to appreciate that that markets are one of the one of the engines of human progress. I'm not going to say it's the only engine, but it's a pretty damn good status game that we should keep playing as long as possible.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  What do you say to people who claim that their fundamental goal in life is to be happy?

• 43:13Speaker 00

  I would say in the nicest and most polite way possible that that is bullshit.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  You know, I'm not trying to be mean, but I do think it's bullshit.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  I don't think we want stuff inside our heads. If you think about the way that evolution programmed our brains, it doesn't make any sense for evolution to program us to want stuff inside of our heads. It makes sense for evolution to program us to want stuff in the world. Stuff like food, sex, status, resources, right? The things that correlated with biological fitness and ancestral environments. Those are the things that we are wired to want and to seek out. We don't want the idea of that stuff. We don't want the story of that stuff. We want the real stuff in the real world. We don't want to be misguided or mistaken. We don't want to be deceived about it. We want the real stuff. So I find the idea that we evolved to want happiness to be fundamentally evolutionarily implausible.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  I don't think it makes any sense, especially when you think about what happiness is from a functional evolutionary perspective. And in my post happiness is bullshit, I give a theory about what I think happiness is. And what I think it is, is a prediction error. It's when your brain expects something to be at a certain quality and it ends up being better than you expected, right? The food is tastier than you expected, the sex is better than you expected. You know, you, you thought that the paella would taste like shit, but it ends up tasting amazing. You thought that everyone would roll their eyes at your dumb joke and everyone's rolling on the floor. Those are the types of things that give you happiness. They are unexpectedly good outcomes.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  And what happiness is, is your brain recalibrating itself in light of an unexpectedly good outcome. So when, when you have a prediction error, your brain sort of lights up and kicks into gear and does all these things to reprogram yourself so you can get more of that thing in the future. So it, it plays the happy scenario in your head over and over again, analyzing it, figuring out what might have caused the good thing to happen, what you got wrong. It's revising your beliefs, updating your expectations, shifting your priorities. All these things are happening when we experience what we call happiness. But that doesn't mean that we want to be happy. That's not the thing that we're seeking. When you play a guessing game, you're not looking to maximize the number of times you hear the words getting warmer. No, you want, you want to guess the thing. That's the point of the game.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  If you guess the thing on the first try without any getting warmers, you've won the game. You've done a great job, right? You shouldn't cry that you failed to get any getting warmers because the getting warmers are irrelevant. They're just there to help you. They're there to push you in the right direction. And I think happiness is ultimately there to push you in the right direction, but it's not the thing we actually want. It's not the thing we're seeking. And even if we did want it, we couldn't get it because it's impossible to get, right? Something that is intrinsically unexpected is impossible to pursue. Pursuing happiness is like planning your own surprise party, right? You can't do it. So I think, in fact, I think insofar as people do pursue happiness or try to pursue happiness as a status-seeking tactic, they are setting themselves up for depression and misery.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  I think we oftentimes, what we don't, we don't want to be happy, but we want to appear happy. We want to appear like a happy person, like we're well-adjusted, we're healthy, we're healthy, we're self-actualized, you know, we're nice, we're happy-go-lucky. That's what we really want. We want to convince other people that we're happy and even convince ourselves that we're happy and perhaps convince ourselves that we really do want to be happy and we're the type of person who seeks happiness as opposed to status or prestige or something. That's ultimately what we're seeking. But insofar as we seek that, we're making ourselves miserable because we cannot get the thing that we're seeking. And so I think a lot, there's a lot of toxicity around the pursuit of happiness and self-actualization. I think we would do well to stop pursuing happiness, because the more we pursue it, the less of it we'll get.

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  What's better to pursue instead?

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I guess our bullshit sacred values.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Assuming that we picked the right ones. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I wish we had a say in the matter. I don't know that we do have much of a say. I think evolution has chosen our desires for us and we just, we do the best we can to fulfill them and we can't really do anything else. I don't, I'm skeptical of the idea that we can remake ourselves and fundamentally redesign our basic desires. I think that's a pipe dream. The best we can do is choose among the desires we have that evolution gave us and try as best as we can to prioritize the ones that are better for us, I guess, better for the world.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  You know, ones that we can, that we're more proud of. You know, I have a 15-month-old daughter. I try to prioritize that desire over my other desires and that's, you know, it's, it's an evolved desire, you know. My DNA is shaping me to care for my offspring, but I don't care, you know, I'm still proud of that desire. I still want to fulfill it and that's, that's a desire I can get behind. And I think, you know, if we, if we're more wise about all the desires we have and choosing among them, I think we can choose better ones or at least shift ourselves a little bit towards the better ones.

• 48:15Chris Williamson?

  You've got a number of hammer blows that are list of problems with the idea that humans want to be happy. So I'm going to read a few of these off, just in case people were not feeling too completely broken yet. We know that if we savor every moment, every smile, every meal, every ray of sunshine, we will be happy. Yet we savor maybe 1% of those moments. We know that if we appreciate what we have, from the roof over our heads to the clothes on our backs, we will be happy. Yet we appreciate maybe 1%, of what we have. Good news makes us happier than bad news, yet we consume way more bad news than good news, even though we can't do anything about the bad news and even though there is plenty of good news available. Anger feels bad, yet when we're angry with our loved ones, we think about all the times they made us angry, which just makes us angrier. Why don't we think about?

• 48:58Chris Williamson?

  All the times they made us happy. We can delude ourselves into believing pretty much anything. The earth is flat, the world is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles, et cetera. Yet, we never delude ourselves into believing that everything is perfect and wonderful as it is. If we were actually pursuing happiness, we'd be very good at it by now, given our many years of practice. Yet, studies show that we suck at it. We're incredibly bad at predicting how happy things will make us or how long happiness will last. There are vast bodies of scientific evidence that could stop us from sucking at happiness, like positive psychology, the science of happiness. Yet, most people aren't very interested in this research because it's kind of boring. We work too much and some of us literally work ourselves to death, even though we're well aware that this makes us unhappy.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

  Having a child makes us less unhappy and more stressed, and we know this, yet we do it anyways, often multiple times. We maintain relationships with assholes, even though it'd be clear that we would be happy without those assholes in our lives. We constantly beat ourselves up, but almost never give ourselves compliments, and we complain about Twitter on Twitter.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Well, you know, it sounds so much better when you read it, Chris.

• 50:02Chris Williamson?

  It's the British accent. But yeah, man, you know, all of those, it's so right. And you kind of lay out a bunch of objections. Oh, well, it's hard. Oh, well, I want to do it, or I try to do it, even though I can't do it. You know, there are a number of potential barriers that people would put in place about why it is that they would want to do that. And they don't manage to achieve it. They mean to do it, even though they're not good at it.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what replaces it, though. You know, peace of mind is the closest approximation I've found to something that's scalable as like a mental state that I think that people should really, really try and optimize for. I think meaning is probably not far off as well, but meaning can actually be perturbed by peace of mind. So, you know, from everybody that I've spoken to, and it often gets into just a semantic argument of like, well, what do you mean by happiness exactly? And what do you mean by meaning exactly? And is it, how long does happiness last? So on and so forth. But it's my belief that if ultimately what we want is to live a life, which in retrospect, we are glad that we lived,

• 51:08Chris Williamson?

  a combination of peace of mind and meaning, peace of mind facilitates everything else, because if you don't have peace of mind. No matter how good the life is, you're Dan Bilzerian in a rocket ship surrounded by Playboy models, like, guess what, you're having a shit time. So that doesn't matter. Your moment to moment experience of the world is going to be tarnished. And if you don't do anything which is meaningful, the second that you do begin to reflect on whatever it is that you've done, you're going to be ashamed of it. Or at the very least, you're just not going to be proud of it. Because I think, you know, meaning is doing the thing which you tomorrow would have wanted you to do. Right? Like, that's, that's a nice conception of it. Yeah, yeah, that was a, that was a good, a good choice for me to make. I'm glad that I did that. And that's

• 51:50Chris Williamson?

  why, you know, when you are faced, if you are on a diet, if you, if you're, you know, tempted to cheat on your partner, or whatever it is, asking yourself, what would me tomorrow want me today to do, is such a lovely reframe. It gives you a little bit of distance. It makes you, project you out into the future. But between those two things, like, I don't really know what the fuck else we're doing here. Like, what, what, what, what, what are we doing here? We're playing these status games. Ultimately, our desires aren't our desires. They're desires that are manipulated by a variety of other things that we didn't get to choose. We're hopelessly at the mercy of these millennia old marionette strings that are playing with our different preferences. Even if we do manage to do enough evolutionary psychology to learn why we do the proximate reasons for our behavior, the ultimate reasons for our behavior come and

• 52:33Chris Williamson?

  smash us in the face. And then happiness, the one thing that's supposed to be this universal good that we were all chasing after, maybe isn't actually that scalable. And how would evolution have programmed into our brains in the first place? So, yeah, lots of, lots of nails in coffins, I fear.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, Chris, I wish I was better at poking holes, or I wish I was better at telling new stories than I was at poking holes in our existing stories. Because I'm clearly better at the hole poking than I am of the telling of the new stories. Maybe that's something you're better at than me. But yeah, no, it's something that I've struggled with. What do we do if not pursue happiness?

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Well, I like your idea of pursuing meaning. What I think meaning is, is ultimately long term. I mean, sorry to bring it back to the depressing evolutionary psychology, but what I think meaning is, is long term fitness value. So we have things that maximize our fitness in the long run with uncertainty and with continued effort and persistence, and we have things that maximize our fitness in the short run immediately. So things like, you know, food in your mouth right now, that makes you happy or makes you feel pleasure. But caring for your child, that's more of a long term fitness maximization strategy. You know, your child isn't going to become a healthy adult all at once. It's going to take many years and a lot of patience and a lot of kindness and support from other people.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  The same thing goes for starting a social movement, forming a tribe that's going to be a successful tribe, or it's going to outcompete other tribes. That takes a long time, takes a lot of effort and persistence, and it might, it might cause you pain in the short run. You know, my daughter can sometimes be a pain in the ass. But what meaning does is it helps me weather those storms. It helps me put up with with those temporary pains and discomforts and keep my eyes on the prize of the long term goal of raising her to be a healthy adult. The same thing goes for other meaningful projects like, you know, forming a stable community, forming a strong tribe, cultivating a valuable skill that gets you a lot of success.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  That's something that takes a really long time and can be meaningful for people. Forming a really good trusting relationship with with somebody can be meaningful. Those things are good. I like those things. I think we should pursue those things. But the thing is, we already were pursuing those things. And we, you know, we never were pursuing happiness. It was just a story we told ourselves to begin with. So it's not so much what should we pursue now that we can't pursue happiness? We were never pursuing happiness to begin with. We were already pursuing the goals that we already had, right? We're already trying to form good relationships and be good parents or, you know, cultivate a valuable skill or whatever. And now it's just. You know, making us more aware of those goals that we actually have.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Right? That's, that's what poking holes in our bullshit does is it, it makes us more familiar with the stuff we're already doing and we even, and the stuff we already want. So, uh, the question of what to pursue instead of happiness, I think is the wrong question. The right question is what story are we going to tell ourselves now that the happiness story is bullshit? Uh, and unfortunately I don't have a great answer. I mean, maybe you can come up with a better answer, but I think there are plenty of other better stories available we can tell ourselves. You know, we're, we're trying to seek the truth. We're trying to understand ourselves. We're trying to make the world a better place. We're trying to be effectively altruistic. And perhaps we're trying to see through the bullshit of effective altruism to make it even more effectively altruistic.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Um, there are plenty of, uh, good stories we can tell ourselves, uh, and I think we just got to choose between them.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  The conflict is where a lot of discomfort arises. So when people believe that they should feel happy and they don't, and you, you're battling against this. I would be interested to know if we had an anti-happiness, happiness movement. That kind of helped to relinquish people from chasing it. I, I wonder whether more of it would happen. First off, I've seen some evidence that people who actually work on happiness or that they purposefully try to be happy. They read books on happiness. They result in having lower levels of wellbeing moment to moment in, yeah, in self-report.

• 56:56Chris Williamson?

  But also that the, the, the pleasant emotion that you get when you do things that you know are good because you've designed them in advance to be good. Because you know that spending time in nature makes you feel better than spending time on the couch. Therefore you spend time in nature and oh shit, as a byproduct of doing this, I, I feel this sense of, well, that, that's suspiciously like happiness. That thing that's just happened to me is roughly proximate to what happiness is supposed to be. So.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I, I wonder whether, um, but again, you know, we spiral it one, one layer deeper. Naval's got this great quote where he says, uh, desire, desires are a contract we make with ourselves to be unhappy until we get what we want. And I don't think that that's necessarily untrue, that as soon as you posit an ideal, you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal. And up until the point at which you reach it, there is a sense of dissatisfaction. You know, if you want the car, you are ruminating about the car, you're researching about the car, you see it on the street all the time, you work and you work and you work and then you get it. And then you just flick on to the next one. So it is a, an agreement that your level of life satisfaction will be capped up until the moment at which another thing happens and you reach it and then very quickly you do that.

• 58:09Chris Williamson?

  That, that ratchet of ever difficulty increasing achievement doesn't seem like a scalable solution for, call it what you want, well-being, human flourishing, eudaimonia, whatever.

• 58:25Chris Williamson?

  I think there needs to be something, something a little bit more reliable than that, something a little bit more scalable than that, that you can find day to day.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the question isn't, you know, what are we going to want? Because we cannot choose what we want. Evolution has already chosen that for us. The question is, what are we going to pretend to want? You know, what are we going to socially reward ourselves for appearing to want? Right? That's the, the one thing that we have control over. We have control over the stories we tell ourselves and those stories are powerful. Those stories actually do change our behavior. Right? So what story are we going to tell?

• 59:01Speaker 00

  I like your peace of mind idea and I think, you know, in some sense, we do want peace of mind. If, if you frame peace of mind as the feeling you get when you get what you want and you no longer want other things, then yeah, I guess we do want that because that's just a different way of saying we want what we want, you know, or we, we want to get what we want. Right? And nature is an interesting example. I, I do think that being in nature is another evolved preference we have, you know, we, we evolved from nomadic hunter-gatherers who, you know, Went from place to place and camped out at different places and settled down in nicer habitats that were more lush and full of life and easier to navigate with, you know, water sources and animals and navigable landmarks like mountains, you know. So I

• 59:46Speaker 00

  do think we have evolved appetites for beautiful natural environments. And I think the modern world has interfered with that desire to a great extent. And I think it is perhaps responsible for a lot of our unhappiness is our inability to be in nature because that's basically, that's the place where we're supposed to be from an evolutionary perspective. And it does make us feel good. I think when you get relaxed and you feel a peace of mind when you're in a beautiful environment, I think that's your brain telling you, hey, take it easy, spend some time here, you know, maybe move here, you know, you know, we, we, we, meaning your genes, we want you to, uh, to stick around here as long as possible. This, this is a good place.

• 1:00:24Chris Williamson?

  I remember, I remember reading a, an article a while ago that explained why vast spanning views, finally, I've got the house of my dreams and the balcony looks over the perfect vista of in the distance and so on. Um, is that, do you think that there would be a, an evolutionary reason for that, given that we would have greater view of potential predators, potential warring tribes, risks, prey, et cetera, et cetera? Is that why we have this preference for big landscapes? It's why, you know, no one, very few people, very few people have

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  a kind of messy bush thicket image painting on the wall. Lots of people will have a beautiful mountainous vista with spanning fields and a sunset in the distance.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I buy that. I, I think there are definite adaptive advantages to having higher ground to overlooking a vast landscape. You have, you know, as you mentioned, strategic advantages over potential invaders, you get to, it's much easier to navigate when you can see the whole landscape in front of you. It's basically just like having a map splayed out on the table, you know, and getting lost was a major selection pressure for our ancestors. Now, if you got lost, you're dead. You can't find your tribe, you're dead. Uh, and so being in a place that's easy to navigate where you know where everything is, there are clear landmarks, you know where the water is, you know, all the different animals there, you know, which places are safe to hide, which places are safe to camp out. I think that's, you know, I, I certainly buy your, your reasoning there.

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  Good. What makes stuff interesting? Why do we find things interesting?

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  Hmm, well, I think you might know where I'm gonna go with this, but I'll, I'll, I'll take you through the journey anyway. So you might think that we're interested in, in stuff that's useful for us, you know, stuff that helps us make better decisions, live better lives, pursue happiness even. Or you might think that we're interested in, in the truth, stuff that's insightful and accurate, that reveals the subtle contours of reality. Really, at the end of the day, we're just, we're seekers of knowledge. You know, we, we want wisdom. You know, that's, that's what we're after when we're, we're clicking through blog posts and, and tweets and Facebook posts. We're ultimately looking to gain useful knowledge, truths about how the world works, right? That's the conventional story.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  But the conventional story is bullshit, unsurprisingly. I don't think we want any of that stuff, or at the very least, it's very low on our list of priorities. I think too often we tell the story about ourselves that we're the smart ones in the animal kingdom, that the reason the human brain is so big is, is so that we can use tools and build impressive machines and conquer nature. I think that story is wrong. I think the reason why our brains are so huge is because our groups are so huge and we need to navigate those groups. I think the human brain is a fundamentally social brain. I think the brain evolved not for tool-making and practical decision-making, but for gossiping, politicking, rule-following, covert rule-breaking, rationalizing, self-deception.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  I think you might call us homo hypocritus, as Robin Hanson calls us. I think if, you know, if, if you reflect on what you actually use your brain for, it's almost completely about people and people-related stuff, right? You don't spend your time thinking about home repair and, and auto parts, right? You know, tools are a very small part of, of the, of the stuff that occupies your mind. Uh, most of the time you're thinking about, oh, how can I make this person happy? How can I resolve this conflict? You're gossiping, you're thinking about conflicts with family members or, you know, you're worried about some snide remark someone made and whether they secretly don't like you or, or whatever. Like this is the stuff that your brain is used for.

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  And if this is what your brain is used for, it's hard to argue that your brain is ultimately a rational tool making machine. It's clearly a gossip and rationalization machine. That's really what it's about. It's about winning arguments, winning social conflicts, gaining status. Uh, and so, once you apply that lesson to what we find interesting, you realize that, uh, what we find interesting is the stuff that fulfills our unflattering social goals that we do not want to admit, either to other people or to ourselves. For example, it lists a whole bunch of them in this post. Uh, it's called, you will find this interesting. Uh, for example, uh, we want attention. Uh, we are interested in things that get us attention because when people pay attention

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  to us, that makes us feel smart and important and special. Uh, and so we are attracted to the titillating, uh, the gory, the scary, uh, the sexy, uh, the gross, um, the paradoxical, the confusing. Uh, all these things help us get attention. Uh, we're interested in things that, uh, almost no one else believes. So strange beliefs, weird beliefs, counterintuitive beliefs. Because if we can prove to people that they're right, well, then we get to look smarter than everyone else. So we're looking for, for that, uh, for those rare beliefs that help us gain an edge over our competition. Uh, you know, same thing goes for moral beliefs. Uh, we want stuff that makes us look morally superior to other people. We want stuff that casts our political rivals in a negative light, uh, that makes our political allies look good.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  We want, uh, information that justifies what we were going to do anyway, or what we wanted to do anyway. Uh, we want to fit in. Uh, we read the news and, and, uh, read about sports and celebrity gossip, not because these things are inherently useful, but because everyone else is talking about them and we don't want to be left out of the conversation. If you think about what's true and useful, you know, the vast majority of it is old and yet we're obsessed with the news. And I think that goes to show that we're more interested in being part of the conversation that people are having than we are at finding useful truths. And you know, the list goes on. We want to, you know, signal our membership and special clicks by, you know, name dropping people that proves that we're in the know and, you know, mentioning books that only members of our subculture would know.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  Oh, Capital in the 21st Century. Only really smart members of the intelligentsia will know that one. And that helps me connect with fellow members of the intelligentsia while subtly excluding dumb dums who aren't as cool as me. So there's all these signaling games we play, these, you know, these clicks we form, the subtle acts of exclusion.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, lots of stuff like that. I go into more ugly, unflattering motors and piece, but that's the gist.

• 1:06:49Chris Williamson?

  I understand that. So give, explain to me why then our brains are so interested in bullshit? Like if they were evolved by natural selection, why do they seem to function so poorly? Why are they not actually trying to seek truth?

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  Well, if you think about the truths that we actually read about on the internet, almost none of them are actually practically relevant. You know, if you, if you think about like, you know, the policies that are going through Congress, like you're not going to be able to affect those policies. Like you can vote, yeah, but you have what? A one in 60 million chance of swaying the election? Like you can't really do, you can't do anything about the, the political events that are taking place in your country. And yet we're fascinated by politics. It's almost all of what we pay attention to, right? Which goes to show that it doesn't make much sense for us to care about what's actually true in the political domain, because what's true or what's false doesn't really affect us. What affects us is our social standing among members of our community.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  So yeah, I might not personally lose out if I support a policy that makes the world worse. But if I support that policy and it gains me status among my political allies, well, then I win, right? So I'm going to care way more about the status I get from my political allies than I'm going to care about whether the policy is actually making the world better. And so it really, from an evolutionary standpoint, it shouldn't matter to us what's true or what's false about these abstract, distant, impractical matters that we read about and talk about. You know, we're not talking about, you know, how to Fix our toilets or like, you know, how to how to do practical things in the real world, at least not most of the time. Uh, most of the time, we're talking about really vague,

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  abstract, fuzzy, political, uh, matters that have no bearing on our our practical day to day lives. And that's where these social motives come to the fore and dominate any other practical truth seeking motives.

• 1:08:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, why why is it then that we are so distracted by those things? Why is it that we care about Congress and and all weird shit?

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they help us fulfill our social goals in a way that practical beliefs cannot. So if I think that, um, let's say, uh, the sky is blue, uh, that's not going to help me to differentiate myself from other people. It's not going to help me sing signal membership in a particular clique, because everyone believes that the sky is blue. You know, if I believe that, um, there's something wrong with my carburetor in my car,

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  other people aren't going to disagree with that. I can't be, I can't use that to gain status, right? So they're really only a specific set of beliefs that we can use to play social games with one another. Uh, and they have to, by design, be disconnected from the practically relevant ones. Because if they were, if we if if we used our practical beliefs to jockey for status and form cliques, well, then our practical beliefs would be wrong and we would fuck up all the time in our lives. So we have to separate the intuitive practical beliefs that we use to actually make decisions from the vague, airy, abstract political beliefs that we use to form groups and jockey for status and never the twain shall meet. Uh,

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  you know, and, uh, that is by design, I think. Because if they did meet, uh, well, we'd make bad decisions and we'd fail in our social goals at the same time. So we have to have our cake and eat it. We have to, you know, intuitively, unconsciously know what's true for the immediate practical decisions we make, while at the same time, uh, pretending to believe all sorts of other weird, abstract, vague things to curry favor with our allies and with the people we wanna, uh, impress.

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  What is the lesson to take away then? Is it that interesting stuff is overrated and that we should seek out more boring shit?

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically. I think that's that's one of the lessons I I take from it. I think

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  we have this bullshit idea of ourselves that that we're, you know, high minded knowledge seekers. And I think that

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  it's healthy for us to see through that. I think we often ignore and neglect and look down upon the boring person at a party or a boring friend or boring family member. We think we're better than them because we have access to more interesting tidbits. You know, we've read the latest think piece and therefore we're better than them.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  And I think this kind of intellectual status game is increasing our sense of loneliness and alienation. You know, if we're trying, if we're constantly competing to be interesting and we're looking for the most interesting conversation partners, well, we're going to spend more time listening to podcasts like this one to make virtual friendships with people who were were who sound really interesting instead of talking to real people in the real world like our friends and family members who might not be as interesting, but will offer us more fulfillment and companionship than the virtual friends that we try to

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  I was on board. I was on board until I realized it was going to reduce the listenership of the podcast.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  Sorry, sorry, Chris. Listen, listen to this podcast, but not any of the other.

• 1:11:59Chris Williamson?

  That's right. That's the this is the only one that is able to thread the needle between evolutionarily what's adaptive and ethically what is optimal. David Princeoff, ladies and gentlemen, David, I love your work. Everything is bullshit.substack.com for your stuff.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  That's correct.

• 1:12:16Chris Williamson?

  It's phenomenal. Everybody needs to go and subscribe to that. Where else should they go to harass you and find your stuff online?

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  You can feel free to harass me on Twitter of all places, the nadir of human happiness. You can find me at David Pinsof on Twitter. Feel free to DM me if you want. I'm very friendly, much friendlier than than I might appear based on my beliefs.

• 1:12:39Chris Williamson?

  David, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  Thanks so much, Chris. It's been a blast.